2010 CheX World Championships

Forget puffing around a track, splashing down a pool, or raising the bar, this is the Championships with intellectual muscle. Its time for your agents to strut their cognitive stuff and mix it with the best in the CheX World Championships! Live Action: 1pm Wednesday 26th May, Lab 2.01
Draw and live scores....

Rules

Configuration

Agents (players) will be required to compete in the game CheX. The first player to take the opponent's king (without losing on time) will be the winner. If both players repeatedly loop through the same moves the game will be a draw.

The starting configuration of the board will be as follows:

The umpire reserves the right to declare a draw where a game appears unlikely to progress to a conclusion, and to change the board configuration or timing for play-offs to obtain a result where necessary.

Players

Players must implement the Agent interface. This should be done by subclassing the Player class.

Timing

Each player will start with 60 seconds on the clock and be allocated a further 6 seconds per move. A player loses if their clock reaches zero. Faster games - "Lightening CheX" - may be used in play-offs (for example where a game is drawn). It is therefore advised that agents take note of the time available and adjust their play accordingly.

You should assume that the competition will be run on Cara's laptop which is a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (with 2GB memory). It is best if you check how much time you have (getRedTime(), getBlackTime() in Game) before deciding how deep to search etc. Remember that lightning games will be used to adjudicate draws.

Note that you are not allowed to consume any computing resources during your opponent's move.

Entries

Each team may have a coaching staff consisting of up to 3 humans, who must be enrolled in AI4211. Each team may enter up to two players in the tournament. At most one player from each team will be eligible to proceed to the finals.

Format of Play

The exact format will depend on how many players are entered. It will normally consist of a round robin qualifying round, followed by a knockout play-off.

Submission Format

Players must be submitted as a single tar or zip package containing all necessary source files. For this competition, to prevent naming conflicts, your packages (players and search classes) must be combined into a single package. The package name must be the login name of one of the coaching team.

For example, if my login name was macnic01 and my player was called Gigantor, all the classes (other than those provided by agent and mixmeta4 of course) needed by my agent would be in a directory called macnic01, with package name macnic01.

After final testing I would change to the directory in which macnic01 resides, and tar it up with the command:

  tar -cvf macnic01.tar ./macnic01

This will list the files in the form:

  ./macnic01/Gigantor.java
  ./macnic01/GeneralSearch.java
 etc

and produce a tar file macnic01.tar. I can check it with

  tar -tf macnic01.tar

The tar or zip file should then be submitted to cssubmit. You should also send a mail message to Tim stating the Team Name, the name of the team members, and the player(s) you are entering.

Deadlines and Dates

The deadline for entering players in the Championships is 5pm Friday 21st May (Week 12). If they are ready you may like to submit them earlier to allow more time for communication if they are not working as they should. The umpire will check the submissions to make sure they work independently (you haven't left out or misnamed any classes etc). Agents may be revised/updated at a later time with agreement of the umpire (that is, provided there is sufficient time before play to install them and that they work seamlessly).

Please email intended team and player details to Tim by midday Monday 17th May to allow the draw to be planned.

Marks

Aside from the extensive fame and glory of having their agent crowned as this year's winner and going down in the history books, bonus marks will be awarded according to the following formula:

For every agent that is entered, 10 marks are added to the pool.
80% of the Pool is distributed proportionally to the number of round robin games won.
The remaining 20% of the pool is split 5%/15% between the runnerup and the winner of the play off.